Engimo Review

    Enigmo is the last game in the Beatshapers bundle I got on PSN that also contained Wizorb, BreakQuest, Canabalt, and Galcon Labs. Not a bad bundle for $7 or however much it was.

     Enigmo is a puzzle game of sorts where water drops from an inverted tank in one part of a 2d level and you must guide it into a receptacle at another part of the level by placing objects that manipulate the water droplets. Some pieces bounce or launch the droplets at high speed. Others let the liquid slide along or deflect it like a piece of steel. One piece acts like a sponge that soaks up the liquid until it drips out of the bottom. After a few stages, you start to have to manage lava and/or oil in addition to the water. The difference between these liquids is mostly cosmetic. All of the liquids (1, 2, or all of them can be in any given stage) must end up with 40 drops in their respective receptacles for the stage to end. The flows into these receptacles have to be continuous, as liquid quickly evaporates out of the receptacles if the flow doesn't continue. This stops you from using the same pieces to divert different liquids. You can't just put 40 drops of water in its spot and then use all those same pieces on the lava. You need to ration your limited parts.

     When a stage begins, you can survey the level by moving the analog stick around before pressing cross to start the stage. Once you start, the water starts flowing, and a bonus gauge in the corner starts counting backward from a high number. If you can beat the stage before that number runs out, you will get that score, plus a bonus for any parts you didn't use. This gives an incentive to move fast and be efficient, but there is no penalty for not doing so other than receiving a score of 0 for the stage. I also got some random score bonuses at some stages, not sure why. Along the left side of the stage is a bank of all the parts available to you for the level. There are eight different types, and you get a different mix in every level. Bizarrely, the game doesn't tell you how many of each part you get. You often have multiple copies of certain parts in a level, but you don't know that until you use a part and then see that it is still available in your bank.

     You cycle through the parts in the bank and parts that you have already placed on the level with the d-pad. This is a little frustrating as it seems to jump around randomly a bit from the objects in the level to the bank. Often you will want to place an object from the bank way over on the right side of the screen. To do so, you'll need to scroll all the way through all the objects you've already placed to your left to get to the bank. Then you must drag the object all the way back to the right side of the screen. There has to be a better way to do this. When you have selected the object you want to place or move, pressing cross puts you in edit mode (as opposed to view mode, where you can look around but aren't moving any objects). While in edit mode you move the object you have selected with the left analog stick. You can move it very slowly with the d-pad for fine adjustments. You rotate it left or right with L1 and R1, respectively. You can change how finely you rotate an item be holding triangle to make rotation slower and square to make it faster. I had to do this a few times to get things just the way I wanted them. By default, it is set to rotate at the fastest setting. Pressing cross again places the object and switches you back to view mode. Seeing how objects will work when placed is a snap since liquid dynamically interacts with objects as you move them around and place them. This is very slick.

     Solutions to these levels often involve placing bouncer parts that send streams of liquid flying around at high speeds. You typically need to set a few of these at the correct angles to get the liquid where it needs to go. There is also a cool part that shoots water droplets out like a cannon, although you must set the liquid up to fly into it at the right angle for it to work properly. In levels that include oil or lava, you always start with just the water dripping. You must make the water continuously hit switches to make the oil and lava start and keep dripping. There are also force fields in many levels that need to be deactivated by making a liquid go through a color coded hoop. There are also a few types of surfaces that make up the level itself that you need to work with. Some reflect liquid, letting it bounce or slide along the surface. One type absorbs it, making your stream disappear. All these elements mixed together in different ways make each level an interesting experience. They don't exactly feel unique though. Each one has you chart a convoluted path for each liquid you are dealing with until you finally have everything in place. There are 50 stages, and they all feel somewhat same-ish, with a few exceptions. In general, you use the same techniques and overcome the same obstacles in each. It would be great if a few more concepts were introduced throughout the game.              Even the difficulty doesn't go up all that much. Once you get about half-way through the game, each level is about the same difficulty: 1 to 5 minutes of mild brain teasing. None of the stages are very hard, and, disappointingly, the last stage is quite easy. Most of the stages aren't easy either, fortunately, but none of them will boggle your brain the way you might expect later levels in a game like this to. Super hard stages in puzzle games like this can be frustrating, but very rewarding. Both that frustration and that rewarding feeling are mostly missing from this game.

     The game does pull off the feeling that you are putting together a unique solution or even breaking the rules. And you probably are in many case. I believe there are multiple solutions to many of the puzzles, and because it is physics based, weird things can happen that aren't going to happen to everyone. It's often the sign of a great puzzle game when you feel like you're cheating to get things done, and I had that feeling a few times during Enigmo as the physics guided the liquid into strange paths and situations.

     The graphics are really great. They are simple shapes and blocks, but they are all rendered in 3d. They easily could have been 2d objects, but as the camera pans around, you can see they have depth. They even look great on an HD tv, with the exception of a few of the menus. Even the big background textures look good on an HD tv despite this being a Mini. It looks like you are inside of a giant silo or something. The lava is especially amazing looking. It's glowing so bright it looks like it's going to burn through your screen.

     Many stages in Enigmo are impressive looking when you complete them. You often have long streams of droplets of several liquids bouncing crazily around a large stage. There are hundreds of droplets on screen, all flying through the air and eventually landing where they need to go. It looks like a giant Rube Goldberg machine that you created. A few days after I beat the game, I came back and completed one of the larger stages just to see the spectacle again.
     It seems like there is a limit to how many drops the game can draw. If liquid starts pooling up somewhere so that too many droplets are onscreen, the game will sometimes compensate by stopping or slowing the dripping of one of the liquids. Also, if you shoot liquid super high into the air, it sometimes will evaporate instead of coming back down. But, the game never has slowdown even when there are a ton of rapidly moving droplets, so I guess it's a tradeoff. It's annoying though when the stream you are working with starts to dry up so you can't clearly see how you are manipulating it.

     There is a bit of a bug where sometimes liquid will not interact with any objects in certain situations. This is often when it is bouncing off of a stationary part of the level in a strange way. This forces you to change what you are doing, which is annoying. This only happened to me in about 4 levels though, so not too bad. The game also annoyingly auto-saves at the end of every level, which freezes the screen. It says press cross to go to the next level, but you have to wait on the frozen screen for a bit before you can actually press cross, which is annoying. While I'm complaining, I'll also mention that at the beginning of each level there is a quick fly-by of the whole level that is un-skippable and totally useless. Also, it's a missed opportunity to not have the camera fly around the level on the z-axis at some point, like when you beat the level. That would be really cool, and the levels are already rendered in 3d, so why not? Also if you go to the level select menu, you can't go back to the main menu; you have to pick a level. Also, you pointlessly unlock levels as you go. Why? One more thing; if you beat the last level, you still get a prompt to press cross for the next level. If you press it, it starts level 50 over again.

     While you play, there is some subtle ambient music in the background. It's really good; sounds like a Mum song. Each droplet that hits an object makes a ticking sound. Just like real water dripping, this can be annoying in some levels, and there's no sound options, so you can't turn it down. Just like real life, it can also sound cool in some stages if the beat is right.

     Enigmo took me about 3 hours to beat. It kind of dragged in the middle, but learning all the concepts at the beginning and doing all of the more challenging (but still not that hard) stages at the end was fun. It needed more concepts and ideas to really be great, but it was enjoyable. It's a mediocre game, tier 1.

Galcon Labs Review

     I've played around a bit with Galcon Labs before I finally sat down to play the whole thing, and the concept seemed really cool to me. Each level is a field of planets. You control a few of the planets, which will be in your color. The enemy also controls some planets, represented in their color. These planets (those controlled by a either you or the enemy) have a number on them indicating how many ships are stationed there. This number goes up as more ships are produced on the planet. The bigger the planet is, the faster it produces ships. There are also many neutral planets, which are gray. They have a number indicating how many ships you need to send there to conquer them. The object is to wipe out all traces of your enemy before they do the same to you.

     The controls are as follows: the d-pad acts as a cursor that jumps from planet to planet. You can hold down circle to make the cursor only jump between enemy planets or cross to make it only select your planets (I never really used this). To attack, you need to select a planet or planets you control. You can chooses them one at a time by pressing R1 while they are highlighted, or select all planets you control with L1. There is no way to un-highlight a planet once it is picked except to attack. You then pick a neutral or enemy planet to attack. You put the cursor over it and press square to send 50% of the ships from your planet(s) or triangle to send 100%. As soon as you press the button, ships launch from all of your planets and head to their target. Once there, each of your ships takes out one of the ships docked at the planet, and vice versa. So you need to send more ships than the number on the planet in order to conquer it. Once a planet hits 0, it changes to your color and the rest of your ships dock there, filling it up with the number that land. Keep in mind that the enemy is doing this same process at the same time, and all non neutral planets are constantly going up in number. These matches only take a minute or two.

     The visuals in the games are pretty sparse. The planets all have irregular surfaces, which look like cratering, like the surface of the moon. The backgrounds are basic space stills; they look ok. The ships themselves are literally just triangles. This is actually pretty cool. It doesn't sound like much, but it all works pretty well visually, and there isn't any slowdown even when things get crazy.

     The first thing to do is the campaign, which quickly runs you through the different types of stages. There are Classic stages, which are just like I described previously. In Crash stages, opposing fleets can crash into and destroy one another while in transit. This is cool, but doesn't seem to have much effect on the winner or loser. The casualties just happen in space instead of at a planet. In Assassin matches there are two enemies. You need to take out a specific one to win. Your target wins if it takes out the other enemy, and that enemy is gunning for you. In Billiards matches, the planets are in motion and bounce off of one another. The final type of match is Stealth, where enemy fleets become invisible shortly after launching so that you can't see where they are going. After a few stages of campaign mode, enemy planet numbers all become an X, forcing you to estimate their strength. And then you are done. Campaign mode only took me about an hour. Most of the stages are too easy, although a handful of them were quite challenging.

     Next up is Fusion mode, where you choose a game type from the five I listed above and a difficulty. There are 10 difficulty levels, which is really weird. You then are thrown onto a random map. As in the later campaign stages, enemy forces are represented by an X, so you have to guess how many ships are at any given planet. Win or lose, you can chooses to restart the map you played or go on to a new map. You can also request a new map while the game is paused if you want to restart with a new layout. If you win, you get awarded points based on how fast you were, what difficulty you chose, and how hard the type of match you choose to play is. When you earn enough points, you gain different ranks. This mode is fun for a bit. I played about 2 hours of it, mainly playing Billiards and Assassin on the mid to high level difficulties. I even had a few victories on the highest difficulty, “Don't Try.” Assassin and Billiards are the most engaging battle types to me. Billiards shows you just how important positioning is. Attacking nearby planets is key as you waste time if your fleet is traveling across the entire screen. This is important in other modes, but is highlighted when the planets are all moving around. Assassin is really fun. Depending on the difficulty you are playing you need to try and let the enemy that isn't your target take some of your planets so that your target doesn't win or try to survive the 2^nd enemy aggressively attacking you.

     The music is really good. There are six songs by my count, one for the campaign and one for each type of Fusion match. They are all cool space electronic music. Very nice.

     This game is fun and interesting, but something's not right. If you're doing the math, you'll notice that I only played it for about 3 hours. I had some fun, but lost interest after that. Different maps do make each game a little different, but my main strategy of making all my planets attack the weakest large neutral planets and then attacking the closest large enemy planets soon became routine. In Assassin matches, all I would do is press L1 to highlight all my planets and then send all my ships after the closest target enemy planet. Some interesting things would happen and sometimes the plan would go wrong and need to be altered, but in general I stuck to that plan once I got used to things. I feel like a big part of the reason I developed these strategies is that picking single planets to attack is so time consuming as to be not worth doing. If you were controlling the game with a mouse or touch controls (there is an iOS version, I hear), this would be much simpler, but as it is, you can't win matches by slowing moving the cursor to one planet and then over to another and back again. This might work if the cursor would snap back to your planet after an attack, but even that would be super clunky. It's often necessary to quickly move the cursor to the target planet while pressing L1 to select all of your planets. This is because of the control scheme, not necessarily because it is the best strategy. The controls shouldn't dictate the way you strategize in this manner.

     I also want to complain about the way you get a bunch of options at the end of the each level, but can't actually pick them until the game auto-saves. You just sit there, wondering if the game has frozen as you foolishly press the button over and over.

     I also wish there was multiplayer. I feel like it would be amazing and strategies would develop that this game's AI could never utilize. Assassin would be so cool in multiplayer.

     The game is interesting enough that I might look into some other games that play like this, such as Mushroom Wars and Planets Under Attack. This game has some fun times. Probably about half of my brief time with it was pretty engaging. That's not much time though. That's why it's a mediocre game, tier 3.

BreakQuest Review (Minis)

     I just finished BreakQuest tonight, and I am ready to play its sequel, BreakQuest Extra Evolution, immediately. After playing Wizorb, I thought I was done with the breakout/ arkanoid genre (in case you don't know, these are those games where you bounce a ball off bricks at the top of the screen and then as the ball comes down, you bounce it back up to the bricks with a paddle. You want to break all the bricks without the ball getting past the paddle at the bottom of the screen). Wizorb was fun, but quite frustrating too. I now think that I may have been frustrated with Wizorb because it was trying to bring order and meaning to breakout mechanics, which are by nature random and uncontrollable. BreakQuest takes the total opposite approach by embracing and enhancing the breakout genre's inherent chaos.

     BreakQuest is a breakout style game with 100 levels. Each level is totally different. When you beat a level and move on to the next one, you never know what it's going to load up. Some levels have standard bricks arranged in patterns. Others have weird shapes that take many hits to break and bounce all over the screen when hit. Some of objects that need to be hit in order. Some have blocks that change colors and won't disappear until you match all of the blocks in a row. Some levels resemble other games, like Space Invaders,  complete with aliens that shoot at you, causing your ship to freeze up if they hit you. In my opinion, seeing what the next level is going to be is the main draw of this game. Just like I mentioned in my El Shaddai review, it's an amazing thing for a game to be so full of surprises that you never know what you're going to see and do in the next level.

     There are also a bunch of quirks and tweaks to the standard breakout gameplay. First off, you can press L1 to activate a strong gravitational pull on the ball. This is limited by a meter that refills for each new ball. This allows you to try to steer the ball into things below it. It's pretty ingenious as it gives you some control over the ball's flight path, but it is very inexact. I would use it every few stages to try and hit obstacles when the opportunity arose. It's hard, and succeeding feels like an accomplishment. This technique is so difficult and situations where you can use it come up so infrequently that it really adds to the chaos of the situation rather than make it more controllable (this is a compliment). It's not like you can steer the ball; that would be a design mistake. It's more like a semi-useful power-up that is always ready to go.

     Speaking of power-ups, there are a ton of them. Looking through the instruction book, I count 60. You read that right. Many of these are good. Many of these are bad. Some of them aren't really an advantage or a disadvantage, they just change things. There are good things, like barriers that catch the ball if you miss it and a power-up that launches 3 extra balls at once (and yes, this does stack if you get more than 1!). There are bad ones, like ones that make the ball's pattern erratic or mess with the controls of your ship. There are many types weapons that let your ship directly fire on the bricks and objects in the level, such as homing missiles and a spread gun. There are power-ups that change the shape of the ball and the bumper on your ship, or change the size of the bumper. And there are many, many others. The combination of 100 unique stages and 60 power-ups really made me feel like I ended up in some unique situations that no one else probably experienced, especially out of control scenarios with many, many balls on screen, some with their own orbiting ball enhancements! The addition of negative power-ups that need to be avoided is a great choice. Often you have to make the agonizing decision to fly through a bad power-up in order to save the ball. This hurts, and goes against your instincts, but losing a ball is a big deal, so you end up having to deal with these negative effects. Power-ups often end up interacting with objects in the level and getting knocked around by the ball, so that great item you're waiting for might keep getting juggled just out of reach, or a bad item might come flying at you as it gets knocked around.

     The d-pad or left analog stick lets you move your ship left and right. Holding square makes you go faster. Cross fires any weapon you might have equipped, and also re-launches the ball when you die and re-spawn. Triangle let's you launch your second ball (each life has two balls). Launching the reserve ball is typically too chaotic to control since juggling multiple balls is really hard (just like in real life), but is great for finishing off a final piece in a level, as you can try to line up your launch. The game also smartly spawns free weapon power-ups toward the end of levels to help you finish up the last few bricks or objects on the screen.

     The music is really cool. It's done by Maniacs of Noise, a group that works on sound effects and music for games and movies and stuff. The game's tunes are all a little different than typical video game music, but in a weird, good sort of way. Unfortunately there is a weird glitch (design choice?) that slowly turns the music down as you play until it disappears completely. Since you can't access the options screen to turn it back up during gameplay, I made many trips back to the main menu to turn it back up since it is really enjoyable. It's a very weird thing. I really want to know if it's a glitch or if they did it on purpose. Either way, it was really annoying to have to keep doing that when I was getting into a rhythm.

     Another little flaw (in my opinion) is the way the ball can sometimes slide down along your bumper and get past you even though you hit it. I feel like if you hit it, it should not get past you. This may be a design choice or a bit of a glitch, hard to tell. This happened to me quite a bit, although not enough to be a major issue.

     The graphics are really cool. Like many minis, there's a different look to it than your typical 2d HD game. And that's a very good thing. There are some really visually stunning effects, such as pieces that explode into confetti or bright colors when hit. Even when you smash many blocks at once and the screen fills with beautiful particles, there's no slow down (well, maybe I saw a hint of it once...)

     There's actually a little story to this game if you read through the digital instruction booklet (accessed on the XMB while you are playing the game). You are piloting a ship to try and shut down all tv signals because they are detrimental to humanity. Something like that. It's accompanied by several weird drawings, and I found it very amusing. Definetly some truth to the idea that tv is ruining humanity (a message given to you, ironically, through your tv). Even a few words and drawings like that can add a sense of purpose and coherency to an arcade style game like this as your imagination fills in the gaps of what you are experiencing.

     Once you beat all 100 levels, there is hard mode to try (actually you can pick easy, normal, or hard from the beginning), as well as arcade mode, which let's you pick from a list of game settings and play random levels. I never tried hard mode, as normal mode is pretty hard (I only ever got to 4th place on the high score table in normal mode), and playing the same levels over in order wouldn't have the magic of having something you've never seen before pop up in each new stage. I played with arcade mode for a few minutes after I beat the game. There are a few easier settings, and a few harder settings in this mode. There is Armageddon Mode, and Master Mode, which are both super hard in different ways. There is Fast! mode, my personal favorite, where the ball is super fast. You either beat the stage or die in an amazingly short time. I like the idea of having multiple modes that are hard in different ways. I'd like to see some other games in different genres have modes like that. Imagine an FPS or action game with difficulty modes like "Bad guys all have great guns but are slow," or "bad guys are super fast, but have normal guns." It's fun to see what random stage you get in arcade mode, but I what I really wanted was more new stages. That's why I'm going to play the sequel. I feel like I could play it right now, but I'll probably wait a bit.

     Despite how much I like Wizorb, my frustration with it made me think I would avoid breakout games from now on. After playing BreakQuest, my interest in the genre has been resurrected. I talked about it's limitations in my Wizorb review, but BreakQuest has show me that by embracing the chaos and randomness inherent in the genre, there is still a lot of fun and innovation to be had. I am now planning on playing BreakQuest Extra Evolution and Magic Ball. And if Wizorb 2 comes out, I'd be willing to give that a go too. I just hope its developers have learned a bit from playing BreakQuest. It's a great game, tier 2.

Why Playstation Plus Isn't For Everyone (But is Still a Great Deal)

     My one year Playstation Plus subscription (which I got free for signing up for a credit card) is coming to an end in just a few short days, and I am not going to renew it. You may have heard that it is an amazing deal and well worth the money, and it is for many people. It just isn't for me at the moment, and I'd like to explain why.

     Playstation Plus is a great deal that gives you a huge return on your investment.. If you bid on codes on ebay, you can get a year's subscription for about $40 -$45, and you get games worth many times that amount of money. But my main concern is the amount of time I have to play games. You may have noticed that I'm making a list of all the PS3 games I want to play before getting a PS4. This list is going to be pretty comprehensive when it is finished. In order for Plus to be worth it to me, there has to be at least $40 worth of games in the instant game collection that I will play that year. The time constraint of one year might not seem like a big deal, but think of it this way. You need to play $40 worth of games every year from your IGC, or you aren't getting your money's worth. The hundreds of dollars of games you “get” on Plus don't have any value unless you play them. Of course, you also need to consider the amount of money saved by buying things on Plus sales. This is a little deceptive, as games that are on Plus sales are usually on sale for normal people too, so you should count the amount of money between the Plus price and the sale price, not the Plus price and the normal price. So really, you need a little less than $40 worth of games in the IGC if you count the money you save buying things on sale.

     At the moment, there doesn't seem to be enough harmony between the bucket list and the IGC to justify purchasing another year of Plus. All those free games are great, but free games are worthless if you aren't going to play them. And then the idea that you need to play $40 worth in a year adds a pressure to the situation that I'm not comfortable with. I want to play the games I want to play when I want to play them and in the order I want to play them, not worry about playing what is free so that I make up enough value to justify my subscription, especially since my free time is very limited at the moment.

     There is the phenomenon of finding hidden gems you weren't going to play and didn't even know about. I played Closure and Anomaly just because they were on Plus, and I love those games. But with my new list, it's getting harder to justify trying just any random game when I have a written out backlog a mile long and I've already passed on the game when choosing my bucket list. I literally looked at every game on PSN, so there aren't any games I haven't heard of. It's possible there's some game out there that I passed on in my bucket list review that I would love if I tried it on Plus, but I'm giving everything a thorough review, which makes that less likely. The fact that we're nearing the end of the PS3's life cycle and I'm making this list is a big part of why I'm not renewing. I looked at all the games and am picking what I want to play. There won't be many more PS3 games. In the middle of a generation (say, the PS4 in a few years), Plus is a great way to try out random stuff it throws your way. Here at the end of the generation with my definitive backlog almost complete, it makes less sense to me.

     In conclusion, I think my $40 is probably better spent buying the games I know I want rather than subscribing to Plus again. This could change, of course, if a lot of games on my list end up on Plus and it's obvious that I'll play $40 worth of them in a year. I'll have to evaluate it as the list becomes more final and the instant game collection gets bigger. I'll also have to do the math and consider buying a temporary Plus subscription from time to time when there are big sales, as some of the Plus discounts are really big. A temporary subscription could pay for itself during a big sale. Playstation Plus is a great value for your money, but remember that you have to play those free games (within a year!) in order to actually get your money's worth.

P.S. Here is a peak of how the definitive PS3 Bucket List is coming along. These games have made the cut. I have hundreds more to look through at this point though!

Flow – beautiful non game

Genesis Collection*

Enigmo *

Galcon Labs*

Retro/Grade*

Wild Arms*

Everyday shooter*

plants vs. zombies*

last of us

walking dead*

Pixel Junk MonstersPS3 version – tower defense

BreakQuest 2

Ico and Shadow HD*

Grubbins on Ice

lone survivor – 2d pixel horror

Siren: blood curse – 8.9 gigs, get European version?